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Compaq to Build Alpha Supercomputer
kfarmer@tru64.org writes, "The French Atomic Energy Commission has placed an order for a supercomputer to simulate and analyze nuclear explosions. The supercomputer will use about 2,000 Alpha chips running in the 1.25-GHz range, or about 2,500 chips at the 1-GHz level."
a.) Take your pick. You can just take the parts of the bible that you like and try to pass them off as factual, when the other parts are such incredulous BS. The first chapter of Genesis states that god, which I will also refuse to capitolize, created the earth in six days. Ahem. I think not. Can you give me evidence that some all-powerful deity reached down and snapped his fingers? Didn't think so.
b.) What about the existence of Mars? Jupiter? The asteroid belt? Did god create those too? Does it say so in the bible? Oh wait, they didn't know those existed when the bible was written. They still thought the earth was flat and was the center of creation, and so did god, despite the fact that he created it all. Hmmm...
c.) My dad is an avid sailboat enthusiast and as such he taught me about the magnetic poles vs. the traditional poles when I was young. The north pole, the geographic one, was the magnetic north pole when it was named. Since then it has shifted, as the earth wobbles on its axis and the atoms realign. At no point would it have been strong enough to have fried any life forms.
d.) Ever heard of dinosaurs? Well, we've found entire skeletons of them. And if people have always existed since the dawn of the earth, how come no one ever reported seeing these things? How come real carbon dating puts these things 65 million years ago? Did they exist only in the first 5 days, before god made the humans?
Sorry mac, listen to your science and ancient history teachers, not your clergyman.
=all this evidence confirms that since we all evolved from this early ancient race of homo sapiens, we're still all really only one race, skin color and skull shape be damned.
="All one race" is a lie, as mentioned above. The ludicrous "evolution" theory is nonsensical as well, since "evolution" could not possibly have taken place in a mere six thousand years (the scientifically established age of the Earth, corroborated by all currently accepted facts of physics, chemistry and geology). In fact, statistics tell us that evolution would in fact have taken nine hundred trillion years to produce even a single cell, much less a human being in the image of God.
Boys, don't confuse "race" and "species". There is indeed only a single "species" of humans on this planet. The definition of species as applied to most higher level critters is that a pair of gametes are able to breed and produce fertile, procreatively viable offspring. That's us, no doubt.
HUMAN BEINGS: kingdom Animalia, phylum Chordata, Class Mammalia, Order Primates, family Hominidae, genus Homo, species sapiens.
Other taxon terms such as sub-species, race, breed, variety and strain mean much the same and in the context of biological classification of Homo sapiens are irrelevant.
If either of you two boys would study some college-level biology you'd both know that it does not take very many generations of procreation within a single species of the Class Mammalia to produce wildly different appearing sub-species, race, breed, variety, strain, whatever, due to influences from their environment. Take a look at dogs, cats and horses as species. Biologically speaking, humans are in the same boat. Four thousand or six thousand or ten thousand years is plenty enuff time for wide variations in physical appearance to manifest themselves in our species, especially considering how we have scattered ourselves around the planet, mistreated our environment and waged war against one another over the millennia.
WRT little boy #2's comment of a human being in the image of God. Does anyone know what God looks like? The God I know exists in the form of energy and works thru the power of prayer. I've seen God's work happen firsthand right before my own eyes, but have never seen "Him". Also OT, but a favorite rant of mine is how can you be sure that God is a "he"? Do you trust all those ancient writings that were written by men and now exist as the three main monotheistic holy books? And how about those men who wrote all the texts and those men who translated the various languages over all those years who were all employed by male kings and monarchist religious leaders who all no doubt had political motive to exert whatever editorial control they pleased over what was written down.
What type of science is involved in that? Fluid dynamics? Some books/URL pointers would be great!
Thanks,
Matt
I quite agree. This computing power is being put to no discernible use. Vast numbers of cycles that could be used to extend human knowledge are being wasted on nuclear simulations. Meanwhile, whole tracts of the South Pacific and Australia remain unbombed.
In any case, there's a far easier way to find out what happens in the heart of a nuclear explosion -- move to Taiwan. You'll find out soon enough, if the Klintons have their way.
Actually the last wave or nuclear tests we French did was to aquire enough data to be able to simulate explosions later, to be be able to continue to improve our enemy vitrification technology...
AFAIK no one in France plans to redo nuclear testing for real... Those Aussies make way to much noise when we do... But we were nice, we even let them win Davis Cup and Rugby World Cup for them to forgive us...
Designing nuclear bombs (fission, fusion, enhanced radiation, ...) is not a trivial undertaking. Take the case of the initial implosion, the explosive charges get set off to generate a pressure wave. The core materials are "real", and are not elastically isotropic. So, to solve for how the pressure wave just elastically deforms the core material in the vicinity of the wave crest involves the 4th rank stiffness/compliance tensor. The bomb people want to increase the core density, so plastic deformation will take place, further increasing the complexity of the equations being solved. Add fission processes, neutron moderation and diffusion, and all the other little things that are going on (some with time scales on the order of microseconds, some with time scales on the order of picoseconds or less), and you have a very difficult mathematical problem.
Please post the Nielsen interview already!!!!
Okay, boys and girls, most of you have been non-educated in non-schools created by the radical Left over the past fifty years since the Truman Conquest of the US government in 1948, but you should at least know this one:
Q. What is the sun?
A. A very large fusion reaction.
Here's another, which might be a little tougher for all you little basket-weavers and folk-dancers:
Q. What is a hydrogen bomb?
A. A relatively tiny fusion reaction.
The sun has been shining on the earth for at least six thousand years. Nobody has been killed by it. No cities have been destroyed by it. The sun is as safe as anybody could want. Fusion is not dangerous or harmful.
I've had about enough of the paranoid, sick, vicious, bigoted hate that the Liberals vomit forth every day of their lives. LIES, okay? Everything you see in the media about nuclear war IS A LIE. Nuclear conflict poses no significant dangers.
Knock off LA? That's a WIN-WIN situation
Mohammad said all Muslims should pray facing in the same direction, towards Mecca. What Mohammad didn't know was that the Earth is a sphere, so there's a point that's directly opposite to Mecca, which is located in Mururoa. In Mururoa, every direction faces Mecca.
This logic oversight was menacing the whole Muslim faith, so the French government agreed (in exchange for oil) to help correct it in the only possible way: blast those blasphemous islands from the face of the Earth. I don't know why the agreement was later revoked.
Excuse me for sending these facts as an AC, but I don't want to suffer Salman Rushdie's fate. You can check the fact for yourself, just look at a World map with sufficient detail to show the Mururoa atoll.
The processors alone don't matter that much.
How data is piped from one processor/memory/cluster/etc. to another is what matters -- and then performance will depend heavily on what sort of problems are run on it.
John
John_Chalisque
A 1300 and 1000 processor T3E(i.e. alpha) has already been done, and the current ASCI systems have >9000(red), >6000(Blue) and ~5800(other blue).
John
John_Chalisque
The U.S. National labs have been doing this for
a couple of years now. Compaq just won a contract
for a new system at Los Alamos to do the same
thing.
Those Compaq designs are from Compaq. The Alpha engineering manufacturing & designs are from the former DEC. I have a true DEC Alpha at 500MHz and I wouldn't trade it for an x86 at any clock speed, except maybe 1.5GHz or so, but I can still up my system to 800MHz if I ever find a chip rated near that speed (good for a 3 year old system, eh?)...
This type of computer contracted to the French has been announced last summer, although not many are using it yet.
Honestly, the last half of your problem belongs on some email list somewhere.
Aarrrggghhh...
It was not MS that gave up - it was Compaq!!!! Compaq decided to drop support for NT on Alpha!!
Partly true. Compaq decided to stop making 32-bit NT on Alpha. It was M$ that decided to kill off NT on Alpha completely!
Who do you think had to maintain Alpha/NT? Clue: Not MS. Yes, DEC/Compaq had to pay for a complete NT software development dept., because DEC/Compaq had to do the maintenance. (same thing when NT used to run on PPC - IBM had to maintain it, until they realised it didn't sell).
M$ had to do some of it. Compaq did most of the work though. Yes I imagine the same is what killed PowerPC and MIPS support.
Then some bright spark looked at the figures and realised that nobody was buying NT on Alpha. It's best marketshare was on workstations - ~15%!! On servers it was even worse - because people who tend to buy nice hardware like Alpha also tend to buy nice OS's like OpenVMS or Unix. People were not spending money on Alpha/NT.
I'm not sure about the percentage, but it is probably close.
They put 2 and 2 together and realised that paying for NT/Alpha was costing more than the revenues generated by Alpha/NT sales. And that's why it was scrapped. The biggest money maker on Alpha is Unix, closely followed by VMS.
Yes and people wanted 64-bit NT, not crappy 32-bit OS on a 64-bit platform.
Also, look how hard compaq is pushing Linux on Alpha. This is for the same reason as why NT was dropped - money. Linux sells a lot of Alpha's.. esp in the lower end, eg Linux marketshare on DS10's is about 40% or higher... it also does well on clusters. And Compaq is pushing linux/alpha clusters really hard.
Yep, Linux on Alpha kicks ass and Compaq knows it!
(my mouse mat is a picture of tux on a fat motorcycle with the Compaq Alpha logo, and a banner saying "Linux SCREEEEAMMMS on Compaq Alpha".. this is an official compaq mousemat)
Cool! Where did you get that?
in fact this Alpha cluster will most likely run linux..
No, it runs Tru64 UNIX with Tru64 clustering software. Like or not, Tru64 UNIX can still kick ever other OS's ass. Don't get me wrong! I love Linux and run it on everything I can, including my Alphas. Linux just doesn't scale that high yet. The largest AlphaServers Linux runs on is the 4100's. Where Tru64 runs on all of the Compaq branded Alphas (except a few NT-only systems that were called "white boxes"). The system will be mostlikely a wildfire system, probably multiple 128-way systems. My point here is that Linux runs great on lower end 1 - 4 way AlphaServers, but that's as far as the support goes. FreeBSD support is still maturing and I do not know how well NetBSD scales. I do not NetBSD runs on AlphaServer 8400's. Anyway anything over a 4100 you'll have to run Tru64 UNIX or OpenVMS.
Did MS bail on the Alpha?
Compaq decided a 32-bit OS on a 64-bit platform (Alpha) that had a low market share, wasn't worth putting out lots of money for. So Compaq said there were gonna stop supporting 32-bit NT on Alpha and was going to pick up where they left off when 64-bit NT finally arrived. Unfortunatly (for those who got the short end of the stick) M$ decided to kill NT on Alpha off completely! The end result is NT is just like Win9x in that it only runs on x86-based systems. Maybe they can write NT/2000/whatever in assembly now and get some decent speed out of it! *grin*
Well, I suppose they will get a realistic view of the heat production with this setup...
In Mururoa, everybody could track their progress.
Who knows what terrors they (and the US and the UK and Russia and Israel and India and Pakistan and Koreas and China and...) are planning for us in their virtual testgrounds.
Nuclear? No thanks!
--
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
When I first started reading theses comments I though our annoymous coward here was just simply mislead by his fundamitalist brain washing.
I must admit I was wrong. Your just an idiot.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
France has argued for years that if we want them to stop testing in the South Pacific then we have to sell them the technology to simulate weapons testing the same way we in the USA do that now.
2500 Alpha CPU's, at let's say.. $1000 each comes to $2.5 Million. How much does this pricing compare to Cray or Origin supercomputers? Alpha's are incredible to say the least, but I'm wondering if we can get a Beowulf cluster going for a cheaper price with similar speeds?
:)
If I was shelling out that much cash, I'd probably want to go MIPS though, but it all depends on the company's infrastructure and needs. I'm overall impressed by Compaq's dedication to providing excellent and reliable products (e.g. Proliant servers), but I'm a little bit edgy with their up and down attitude towards Alpha lately.
EraseMe
I couldn't even imagine how much processing power it would take to calculate missile trajectories and such. It's probably relatively close to making films like Star Wars or Toy Story, or large decryption. It takes a lot of power to try and bring such large math as close to real time as possible.
EraseMe
Okay then.. a 600Mhz UltraSparc3 would be relatively close to a 750Mhz 21264 Alpha to a 1000Mhz P3 on SPECint benchmarks I believe. Wait till the 1500Mhz UltraSparc5's are out though .
Intel's downfall is they are moving further and further CISC with their P3 SIMD, while Alpha's are easily pushing ahead along with Sun on beautiful RISC CPU's.
Then again, the P3 will probably kick Alpha's ass on gaming benchmarks, but the Alpha will most definately nail the P3 to the ground in processing war applications.
EraseMe
Why go to all the expense PBS has it free on its website:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/ame x/bomb/sfeature/mapablast.html
Hydrogen bombs can yield just about anything you want them to. They are fairly scalable, from sub-megaton to many hundreds of megatons.
The fission bombs dropped on Japan yielded at the most 20 kilotons. The smallest fission bombs can fit into a backback transportable by a single person, and their blast would be only about a city block.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
If you are saying that no person has ever been killed by a hydrogen bomb, then yes that is true.
The simulations do seem to indicate that if a person were to stand within 10 feet of a hydrogen bomb, they would be killed.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Also, I could have sworn that there were restrictions on the computational power that we could export from the U.S. Something that breezes through nuclear calculation could probably brute-force crack most encryption methods in an afternoon...
And your point is? There are restrictions on "technology transfers" of this nature. So what. Naturally, they've gotten the export license for this thing, or they wouldn't be telling the world about it, now would they?
As for the crack about encryption, who needs encryption when you're "breezing" through simulations of nuclear explosions? Why decrypt intercepts from other nations, when you can explode nuclear devices in the atmosphere and take out their communications infrastructure?
Just as a side note, the last I heard, use of encryption in France by private citizens requires governmental permission. Anyone in France care to correct/comment on this?
Just be sure to wear the gold uniform when you beam down -- you know what happens when you wear the red one.
Actually, they arent simulating the blast effects, they are simulating the supercritical state which exists during the first nanoseconds of a nuclear explosion.
These computations will be used to design / build more efficient (read: clean) nuclear weapons.
Quite a few posters seem to think this will simulate the entire nuclear blast process, which would entail a large amount of fluid dynamics (weather prediction basically).
However, this is not the case. What they are doing is simulating the compression -> supercritical process that occurs when the detonation lenses used to implode the nuclear core or 'pit' are detonated.
These calculations usually rely on finite element analysis and atomic decay / fission simulations. (nuclear & some quantum physics calculations)
The simulations have to handle multiple variables which interact with each other like:
- detonation shock wave velocity
- detonation shock wave effects of lensed charges on the heavy metal driver layer of the pit.
- implosion vectors for the heavey metal (usually uranium) driver layer as it implodes through a surrounding vacuum around the inner beryllium/plutonium core.
- implosion vectors for the inner core (beryllium jacket and hollow tritium / dueterium filled plutonium sphere) as the driver transfers kinetic energy and implodes the core itself.
- Calculation of effects on rate of fission and efficiency as the inner core goes super critical.
- Calculation of the effects of the beryllium neutron reflector layer surrounding the super critical core.
- Calculation of the effects of the neutron source at the center of the imploding core (the deuterium / tritium)
All of this together is used to determine the yeild and efficiency of a given nuclear device. In all likelyhood they have the lensed detonation charge values already computed / interpolated and the majority of the simulation goes towards the fission reaction simulation.
All sorts of variables are optimized by this approach, such as the shape of the heavy metal driver layer (surprise! a perfect sphere is not the most efficient geometric shape, probably due to the slight differences in the effects of the implosive shock wave generated by the surrounding lensed charges relative to the position of the lenses and location and rate of triggering detonations)
The size and shape of the beryllium neutron reflector jacket surrounding the plutonium core.
And finally the size and shape of the plutonium core itself, and if/ how much deuterium / tritium is at the very center.
So, hopefully that clears up the issues regarding what exactly they are simulating, and why the need for massssive floating point power is mandatory.
Every supercomputer company has its maximum
"pie in the sky" configuration, but corporations
cant afford these $50+ million price tags.
How do we know we can every reach these capacities?
Answer: governemnt agencies- DOE, NOAA, NSA-
buy a few of these uneconomical computers
to keep the industry on their toes.
I support limited purchase like this,
but not the wholesale subsidy of the supercomputer industry like
during the 70s nad 80s (e.g Thinking Machines).
By "simple", I mean the computational power required, not the mathematics involved.
X-Plane claims to have engineering-accurate flight simulation for most of the aircraft it models. I tend to believe that this claim is exaggerated, but it still does a good job with very little power. Most of X-Plane's computational requirements are wasted on pretty graphics rather than calculatin aerodynamics.
You really, really don't need a supercomputer to do this stuff. As proof, I point to the Apollo missions, which were planned and executed using mostly slide rules and the occasional "supercomputer" that is probably a hundredth of the speed of a cheap desktop now.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
It doesn't and it oughtn't. It runs Tru64.
(jfb)
To spur "enterprise Linux," Big Bang, the distributed two-phase commit.
"While Intel-based designs clearly dominate the computing market, Lipcon said there is very little overlap between the two technologies because Alpha does not run on any Windows-based systems."
Well, that's not entirely inaccurate. After all, Microsoft dropped the Alpha support in NT round about NT4/SP4.
Also, I could have sworn that there were restrictions on the computational power that we could export from the U.S. Something that breezes through nuclear calculation could probably brute-force crack most encryption methods in an afternoon...
I thought the French banned almost all encryption. Surely to have an encrypted message of any form would violate their own laws...
...instant grits.
Admit nothing, deny everything and make counter-accusations.
For a nice article on simulations performed for the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider:
A Taste of Quark Soup
BTW, this research was done a T3E (which uses Alphas).
Sean
Hmmm.. AFAICR, the French are powered predominantly by nuclear power. So, by switching this thing on, they'll generate a whole stack of plutonium. Handy!
"Give peace a chance."
Don't build a computer to test nukes, build a computer to help cure cancer. Let's use our high end processing power for playing chess and doing good.
Okay, I'm probably OT, but I was listening to Mr. Lennon last night, and sometimes his lyrics just ring so true.
--
then it comes to be that the soothing light at the end of your tunnel is just a freight train coming your way
Oh, give me a break. Don't you guys ever think before you post your drool? This thing's not a Beowulf: it's the Dragon.
Linux is great for a lot of things, but if you're shelling out the money for 2000+ alpha chips, you're not going to run Linux. You're either going to run a custom OS designed just for this task-- and I doubt the French will open source it-- or *BSD with a customized kernel.
Somewhere else on the net, some asshole read the same article and said, "Cool! Too bad it won't run NT." Don't be that asshole's linux-using brother.
--Kevin
Who says this has anything to do with exporting from the US?
could be made in france or taiwan
They did. But now they're quite keen on their citizens using encryption.
No, it means the French won't need to do actual testing anymore. The last couple of tests were so they had sufficient info to be able to do simulations.
Much better to do simulations in France, than real tests in Mururoa/Fangataufa.
Did you realise though, that the Chinese test site is actually closer to AU/NZ than the French test site ?
Well, maybe they're OOP proponents??! My guess would be that the simulation is MFC-based, though...
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -Douglas Adams, THHGTTG
Considering the current "situation" between France and the USA over Echelon, I'd be a bit paranoid if I were placing this order.
Think about it - you have 2500 radio transmitters, with timing accurate to 1GHz. Use this as a phase array and you could transmit a pencil-thin beam of radio/microwave energy at any satellite or other receiver you choose.
I'm sure this machine would have plenty of processing power to anaylse its own activity and transmit data in this way without anyone noticing the loss of clock cycles.
IIRC, details of DEC's VMS operating system were among the things that the Cracking ring broken by Cliff Stoll we selling to the Russians. Is that a coincidence? Is it a coincidence that DEC, VMS and AXP (the true name of the Alpha) are all TLA's?
You might think so, but I'm not so sure.
Be careful. People in masks cannot be trusted.
Yeah, it was a year or two ago when MS gave up on the idea of running NT on multiple architectures and stuck to intel.
It really depends what kind of accuracy you are looking for. You can write an engineering level code that solves basic equations for aerodynamic forces, and get first-order accuracy in predicting steady, inviscid, incompressible flow over a two dimensional airfoil at a small angle of attack on a standard pc; you can even get results within seconds if you make enough broad assumptions. However, this will give you very simplified results that are only valid inside the range of the assumptions used. If, for instance, you wanted to solve an off-design screech problem in a modern fighter engine combustor or afterburner, at temperatures outside the range of constant air properties, you would need to solve the full Navier-Stokes equations, probably including unsteady terms, turbulence terms, vitiates, gas chemistry anomalies, airfoil expansion due to temperature gradients (which in turn require complex grid generation/regeneration) etc. Try to do this on even the fastest PC and you will be waiting for years.
Quick example: to complete a full analysis of an 11.5 stage high pressure compressor on a 48 processor HP workstation (180 mhz) takes 50 days! of wall clock time. This isn't even a full engine, just one component. While obviously an extreme, since the code makes literally no assumptions (within the limits of human understanding of the physics involved in the problem), it comes to mind immediately as an example of the level of complexity involved in calculating any problem, whether it be molecules of air or sub-atomic particles, to the degree of accuracy required by modern scientists/engineers. Disclaimer: I am not completely familiar with the specifics of this code because it is/was a NASA Glenn project. I saw the tail end of a paper presented for it back when it was still Nasa Lewis... I have a copy of the paper, somewhere, but it escapes me. If I find it I will post the TR# and you can look it up at a tech library somewhere.
I have never used the x-planes program you mentioned, but from looking at it I believe they can probably do what they claim. They aren't really claiming a lot, however; the real applications for high performance computing are in high order engineering and design for detailed performance analysis. Engineering level analysis is pretty simple and their level of detail could probably even be accomplished with table look-ups.
Rev Neh
... and there is no doubt, that one day he will be
where the eye of his telescope has already been
australia is not next door
...France intends to use this instead of doing the tests for real (remember a few years ago?), then this is great news.
:)
Interesting that this comes so soon after the magical 1GHz announcements by Intel and AMD. Surely not a coincidence?
--
Listening for the sound of the coming rain...
If you only simulate nuclear explosions on a computer you aren't detonating nukes. No detonation, no (or at least significanlty lower) chance of radiation leakage.
Is this an ideal application of supercomputing power? Maybe, maybe not. But it sure beats the alternative.. once you have the data so you *can* model things, that is.
I don't subscribe to RMS's GNUtopian vision.
Neither of you know the facts; you're just talking about whose dick is bigger This is excatly the kind of thing that gets in the way of objective science.
PUBLIC SPLIT ON WHETHER BUSH IS A DIVIDER -CNN scrolling banner, 10/15/2004
The Ad Hominum fallacy of formal logic is as follows: to attack another person's credibility instead of their arguments. An argument's truthfullness is not affected by who puts forth said argument. This previous post includes no new facts for the argument - it is a stream of insults; irrelevent. The only fact he uses is a restatement of his original argument; "The sun is a fusion reactor," which has already been addressed by his adversary.
PUBLIC SPLIT ON WHETHER BUSH IS A DIVIDER -CNN scrolling banner, 10/15/2004
relying on the bible for facts, while very convincing to religious people, doesn't do jack when you're talking to atheists like me. Keep your theology to yourself, unless you can back it up. Even religious people admit the bible has plenty fo bullshit in it.
PUBLIC SPLIT ON WHETHER BUSH IS A DIVIDER -CNN scrolling banner, 10/15/2004
The PowerPC 0.15um G4 dissipates about 12 Watts at 500 MHz. Yes, 12.
What was your point again?
--
NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
And, the power consumption requires an atomic electrical plant to run the system, thus justifying the importation of large amounts of radioactive matter.
^_^
--
NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
Missile Trajectories are simple in Physics 101, where every trajectory problem started with: "Ignoring wind resistence, and assuming constant mass..."
----------
Stupid sexy Flanders.
The French Atomic Energy Commission has placed an order for a supercomputer to simulate and analyze nuclear explosions. ;)
So when you turn on the 2500 Alphas the explosion is the magnitude of a nuclear device?
Technology is only a vehicle. People are the ones that drive it.
To continue your rant, if CPU speed mattered, a cheap wintel box with a cyrix at 233MHz would whomp the pants off an origin with a 150MHz R10000 CPU. I don't think so. You might be able to find something that would run faster on the cyrix... but I think that pretty much anything involving floating point wouldn't fall into that category. Of all the many things which determine a systems speed, MHz may be the easiest to understand, and the least important. Perfect for marketing purposes!
See what I've been reading.
Mhz within a given implementation of an architecture is the only thing that can be relevant, and even there it depends on the workload. You'll see linear scaling of performance on stuff that's not memory intensive, e.g. RC5 cracking. For most "real world" apps, you'll spend a great deal of your time bottlenecked somewhere other than the core, so the ratio of speedup to frequency will be less than linear.
It's pretty important to remember that implementations of architectures can vary drastically in capabilities, too. EV6 (the 21264) is a MUCH more aggressive microarchitecture than EV5 (21164). Even though you can get an EV5 or and EV6 at the same clock speed, the EV6 will trounce the EV5 in performance, due to higher bandwidth, out-of-order execution, etc.
On the other hand, there are cross-architecture frequency comparisons that can be valid, like, say, an EV5 vs. and UltraSparc II. Both are quad-issue, inorder cores with similar amounts of bandwidth. Frequency comparisons between the two aren't precise, but they are a pretty good rough comparison of performance between the two implementations...
Why would you want to put so much into analyzing nuclear explosions?
The horsepower comes from NOT runnint the nuclear explosion. I'm not up to date on the various treaties, but what they are allowed to actually blow up less and less as time goes by. But they still have to convince potential invaders that they know what they're doing.
So you blow up things inside computers. And you convince your enemy's scientists that your simulations are valid.
It just shows how out of touch I've become with the windows world. I remember the big tours when MS and DEC were convincing everyone with joint presentations that NT on Alphas were sliced bread. The neatest idea since better mousetraps. Whatever.
Now the press tells us that While Intel-based designs clearly dominate the computing market, Lipcon said there is very little overlap between the two technologies because Alpha does not run on any Windows-based systems.
Did MS bail on the Alpha?
Hey man, I fear you have a 4-year lag.
France has not done any nuclear testing for several years, and the last experiments REALLY were the last ones (well, I hope, with politics you never really know).
Fetchez la vache !
It is really hard to compare a 1Ghz Alpha chip to a 1Ghz Athlon or PIII by using frequency. It is almost like saying that if a Ford Pinto and a Porsche both redline at 6000 rpm, then they are equally as fast!
Disclaimer: This is an arbitrary comparison, I do not know that actual redlines of the above vehicles!
Furthermore, I am not saying that an Alpha chip is like a Pinto and an AMD chips is like a Porsche... I am just saying that it is a poor comparison. Frequency is misinterpreted. Hell, I've seen monkeys at the zoo jerk-off at about 2.5Ghz, but they suck at calculations!
What I find amusing about this article is Compaq announcing a supercomputer with 2,000 CPUs running at over 1 GHz each and gets very little press (Slashdot non-withstanding).
We have been seeing Intel and AMD press releases about once a week announcing another "breakthough" with a 850 MHz chip and the race to release a 1 GHz chip.
Everyone forgot Digital released a 1 GHz chip long before and x86 platform got anywhere near there. I wish I would have know about the goodness of the Alpha earlier.
Didn't Al Gore invent the Beawulf cluster and the 1.ghz computer?
At the CalTech Center for Advanced Computing Research they are using HP Exemplars in a similar fashion. Though they claim "The HP Exemplar X-Class server installed at CACR, at 256 CPUs and 64GB memory, is the largest cache-coherent shared-memory computer in the world" and I don't _think_ that is true anymore, it is still an impressive piece o' hardware and the work looks mighty cool.
From what I have read on it, they are simulating and databasing the results of particle collider experiments which are planned in a few years. Personally, I like the idea of researchers having the ability to do that kind of stuff on a _simulated_ basis and get most of the bugs worked out ahead of time. If they can do that with success for nuclear testing we may see the end of the need for "test detonations". I'm not some peace love and tofu GreenPeace activist, but I'd rather not irradiate a good portion of the only planet we have in the name or science. Call me wacky.
Hmmm... think they'd let me use it as a Quake3 server?
Ceci n'est pas une sig.
It's even worse than that: clock speed is only useful for comparison within one implementation of an architecture. The quirks of each design (number of functional units, cache and virtual register file sizes, number of instructions fetched/queued/dispatched per cycle, etc.) have a big impact on how speed translates to actual performance. For eaxample, if you took a PII and a PIII running at the same clock speed, you would expect to get difference performance.
That sort of result usually indicates that you've hit a bottleneck somewhere between 300MHz and 400 MHz. A good guess is that it's something that doesn't scale linerally with the processor speed, like cache size or memory bandwidth or even I/O bandwidth (depending on your application). In an overall system architecture designed to scale well, you would expect to see closer to linear scaling with the clock speed (up to whatever point the system was designed to scale to, and not counting poorly tuned applications).
As for SPECint/SPECfp for the processor in the system for the CEA, you won't find them yet. If you read the article carefully, you'll note that the system isn't due to be delivered for more than a year. It's going to use 0.18 micron 21264's, which are being manufactured in small quantities for testing and QA but haven't shipped yet. You can bet they'll be faster than any GHz x86 though.
CVS is teh suck. Use Vesta instead.
http://www.swox.com/gmp/gmp-speed.html
The Alpha 21264 (aka EV6) pretty much beats the crap out of everything else. It's widely known that the Alpha is far and away the best platform for intensive mathematics.
FWIW, an EV6 (or any alpha, for that matter) can do both a FADD and FMUL in one cycle; a 1GHz Alpha therefore gets 2 GFLOP/s (assuming no cache misses, of course). A lot of the optimizations from generation to generation are for improving branch prediction, cache service, etc, which helps get the real-world numbers closer to the theoretical.
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http://gammatron.weblogger.com
It gives you the ability to model the reliability of old existing weapons and design new ones without having to violate test bans. The test the French were beat up over a couple of years ago was supposidly so they could get a few pieces of data they needed to be able to do computer modeling.
Holy Shit! and that is with normalized data.. the 21264's just CRUSH everything else.. Hmmn.. *starts saving up his money* I can live with Tru64 unix :p
Anyone have some decent info on Alpha's and how their chips perform in comparison to Pentiums and Athlons?
:-)
I feel in the dark because I know a 1gz Alpha probably stomps mudholes in a 1ghz Athlon. How bad are these chips?! Anyone know?
JA
I really wonder what OS they're going to run on that.. a Beowulf cluster of that size would be quite cool, actually... :)
I wonder if they would let me run SETI on that one
it seems to me that Compaq are going to sell a computer that is going to analysis the destrution of the south pacific.
This is not news it is evil and as geeks we should moblise against such acts against all decency.
blog and junk
I'm just waiting for the /. Troll to propose setting one of these puppies up to compute the fluid dynamics of hot grits.... :P
-- WhiskeyJack, wincing in anticipation.
Damn all Trolls to the infernal netherworld of Bill Gates' sex dungeon! May their noses be cleft and fornicated with! May their navel lint spontaneously combust while a three-leggeed cocker spaniel gnaws on their scurvy-yellowed eyes! May their tongues be wrenched from their mouths and used to flagellate wet poodles. And, most dread curse of all, may they be forced to beta test the next Windows release!
-- WhiskeyJack, feeling _much_ better now.
A. 92 million miles
Q. How far away is the pacific?
A. A maximum of 24 000 miles away
Q. What's the maximum "kill radius" of a nuclear bomb?
A. About 24 miles
Looks safe enough for me. Can't say the same about Godzilla.
I'd just clicked the submit button then thought "Hang on! I've just responded to a Troll."
First, the pedantic nitpicking spelling correction: you should have written "No, it's irritating". "Its" is the possessive of "it"; "it's" is the contraction of "it is".
We need more trolls in /. We need the old style trolls, the funny and original ones. Slashdot went wrong when 80% of the funny comments started being moderated as "troll" or "offtopic". If you are going to be labelled "offtopic" anyway, what's the point of making an effort at being good? Just post any shit at all. In the end, we get the lowest common denominator, the naked and petrified repetitions, because the real good humorous trolls never get moderated up.
We got, for some reason, a bunch of boring "East Coast Liberals" as moderators, people with absolutely no sense of humor. People who think any long winded, maudlin, politically correct, rambling bunch of platitudes is "insightful". These people moderate each other up; while the original thinkers, the funny trolls, the intelligent people, get negative karma and never get to moderate.
Why is it that *NO* short comment *EVER* gets an "insightful" label? People publish books of one line quotations, you find those near the cash register at any bookstore. Those one-liners are published because they are supposed to be "insightful". Again, *WHY* no one-liners are ever "insigthful" at /.? Because there's some people who never had an insight in their lives moderating here. They don't know what "insight" means.
So, FUCK YOU, anonymous COWARD, who is afraid to sign your comment and think trolls should be ignored. *I'M A TROLL AND I'M PROUD OF IT*. I have the karma to spare, I may be throwing away some good karma points in this comment, but I don't care. I'm setting the initial score here at +2, just to show you I don't care about throwing away a couple of points.
Good trolls, funny and original ones, should be encouraged; they are what Slashdot is all about. This has been one of the best threads I've seen in a long time. Congratulations to all the good trolls here!
BTW, we have had more VMS system crashes than NT crashes in our site these last few months. VMS used to be *the* OS on which you could rely for process control applications.
I wonder if Compaq is just abandoning VMS support? For instance, we had AXV11 A/D converter boards in our VAXes which we had to throw away, the last device driver they made for it was in VMS 4.7.
Does anybody know how many VMS experts are there left at Compaq now?
In 1998 it Was DEC that was aquired by Compaq, and Alpha was a technology owned by DEC. Additionally NT 3.5 and NT 4 Ran on Alpha (although it's been since 1996 Since I last used NT on an Alpha)
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Take a look at http://www.top500.org and check out #1, it's Intel Based and obviously massively parallel, Crays (SGI's) are up there but not at the TOP. SGI didn't do Cray any favors when they aquired the company. Their R&D has suffered. Hey, take a look at where the Sun 10000's rate on the chart as well.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Why would you want to run Linux on it? Linux is good for some things, but it is neither scalable or reliable/dependable, and has no real enterprise-level features, not to mention no real clustering technology.
Linux isn't for everyone, or everything -- /. idiots need to stop believing that it is. And I'd be surprised as all hell if any of the "LINUX IS GOD!!! IT CAN DO ALL!!" idiots knew anything about Linux. Oh, so you can install it via the RedHat installation GUI. Oh, you can compile BitchX and do IRC warrioring. I fear. Really.
That's all for now.
-y.
I wonder why. Perhaps they shouldn't be running Linux. Just my fourteen cents.
-y.
Excellent points. Good job not letting the overheated emotions that appeared previously in this thread cloud your thinking.
Don't cry over spilt milk. It just makes it salty for the cat.
Well, I guess I'd better come to my defense. I think some people read the details of my post, guessed at my political afiliations, then missed the gist of what I was saying completely.
I did not have any intention, nor in any way, questioned, acknowledged, denied, or otherwise discussed the motivations for the bombs we dropped on Japan. I thank those who clarified me on whether they were fission of fusion bombs. Frankly, I couldn't remember.
My Point was thus: Nuclear reactions and the ensuing engergies released are not harmless, and, in fact, quite harmful to what we define as life. My purpose was to point out the logical flaws of another person in the spirit of debate. My aim was scientific and rhetorical. It was not to comment on the right or wrong of weaponry or sources of power. Those are my personal opinions. And they shall stay my personal opinions, and not my public ones.
The reason for my posting to the thread at all is found below every reply box we type into: "Please try to keep posts on topic". Going from Compaq's building of a 2000/2500 processor supercomputer to "You suck because you think it was okay to bomb Japan" & "You suck because you think it's not!" in just a few postings is, in my opinion, far off topic.
However, I know that these are open forums, free of charge, and a wonderful expression of the First Amendment. For myself, I limit my freedom of expression. On the rare occasions where I post to Slashdot (I actually only have one other current posting and maybe one or two more a coupla months ago), I try to stay as much on the topic at hand as possible. I have strayed from that goal, and have in doing so incited a political discussion more appropriate for the open forums of HissyFit. I apologize for doing so. To avoid further debate, I would like to say that my opinion to limit the Slashdot Forums to purely technological topics is aimed purely at myself. It does not bother me in any way that others follow threads like this one, and post to this one. It's America. You can do it, so go do it! :)
I am, first and foremost, a Christian. But, regarding my opinions on posting, this says it best: "Do as thou wilt, an it harm none."
I did as I wished, but it did harm. What I had intended to be a slightly sarcastic and slightly humorous rebuttal turned into its own little flame war. And so, I apologize again for my post. And so I shall not post again, so that it harm none.
Again, I apologize for the post.
Um, sure, go right ahead & believe that. Oh, and since you believe that, I have some great Ocean-front property in Dallas, Colorado that I can sell you for a buck an acre. The only reason we aren't all dead from the solar radiation is that little thing called the Ozone layer. What produces the radiation the sum emits? Nuclear reactions. And Nobody killed by it? The families of victims of skin cancer would, I'm sure, beg to differ with you.
Hiroshima. Nagasaki. Ring a bell? (Even though I'm sure I spelled one of them wrong. Maybe both.) No, the sun didn't cause those cities to be leveled. But. No human tissue puts up any resistance to the energy outpoured by a nuclear reaction.
In short, if the reactions going on in the sun were safe for humans, then I guess you'll be the first in line to volunteer for the mission to the heart of the sun? I guess that's actually a good idea, because you're either brilliant in seeing beyond the lies the media gives us, or a crackpot. A mission to the sun would prove which. If you succeed, you'd be a hero to millions, the next John Glen (also insuring you a Senate seat too!), or you'd burn up and we'd never hear from you again.
Nuclear bombs don't kill people. People kill people.
OK, seriously... If we ever get into a situation where we know, say, 4 months from now an asteroid is going to hit the Earth, then one of those big cherry bombs might come in handy.
I just hope we can find the common sense to use them on space rocks, and not on ourselves.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I thought slashdot was open-minded enough to no produce such FUD but it appears I am wrong.
The curse of the open minded is that they must also tolerate the bigoted.
Q. How far away is the sun?
A. 92 million miles
Q. How far away is the pacific?
A. A maximum of 24 000 miles away
Nice to know that nuclear war is so safe. I'll set off an H bomb in my garden! It won't kill me, or destroy anything because the sun doesn't.
Anybody know how to set off an H-Bomb without using a conventional atomic bomb?
How do you know any of the things that were taught to you are true? You are just taking the word of somebody who took the word of someone else that took the word of someone else, etc. etc. How are we to know that any of this stuff is true and not fabricated by some oppressive force that seeks to keep us all in check by making us believe lies about the fundamental workings of the universe? How do we know! The sun might be shining, but maybe.....just MAYBE it's NIGHTTIME! OH GAAAWD!
"When you gotta shoot, SHOOT! Don't talk." Tuco Benedicto Pacifico Juan Maria Ramirez
You know those frogs. They'll sell anything to anybody.
I'd like to see Kasparov take this beast on. Will they do anything high-profile with this computer? I mean, science is great and research is an invaluable asset, but could they host a solid 128 man deathmatch on a huge map?
The U.S. program to substitute simulation for nuclear testing is described at www.sandia.gov/ASCI. Open the "program overview" link. Also, there is a lot of interest material on ASCI at gils.doe.gov/htmls/gils/query.html if you search on ASCI. These huge MPP's are specialized computers that lend themselves to a small set of problems. The real world work that gets done on supercomputers and other HPCs is done on a few processors. Look at www.marc.com where they brag about doing finite element analysis on a couple dozen processors. The simulations that give us cars to drive, planes to fly in and cruise missles to beat up on bad guys with are done using programs such as MSC NASTRAN (see www.mechsolutions.com ) on a very few processors with the hardest problems done on vector supercomputers.
Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years
lol.. from alpha computers to how long earth has had man on it, to a political argument..
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Alright PAL. I changed my quote. I dont know where the hell you get ideas of my vision of the world being linear. I never said anything about this country being truly free, or not being truly free. I merely made a joke about it! So Stop it with your moral hurting text laughs.
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my bet is...France is building it's own Echelon! There you have it.
I guess none of your relatives died in the pacific or during the raid on Pearl Harbor. Those cities were helping the war effort. Furthermore, if the United States unjustly attacks another country, I have an affermative duty to prevent or arrest that action. ie: the demostrations during the Vietman war. Those people weren't exactly "innocent" War is about killing more of them quicker than they can kill you. That is what the A-Bomb allowed us to do. The estimates for the loss of life if we had to invade Japan are in the millions. Truman made a good strategic move. Furthermore, had the war lasted any longer than it did Japan would had have jet fighters (in production before the end of the war), possibly nuclear weapons (uranium on the way from Germany in a sub), and the would have had time shore up their defense. It would have taken pretty much leveling the islands to end the war. In the end everyone benefited from the A-bombs being dropped on Japan.
PS I hate to think where else they could have dropped.
My bad. Doing Calc and Physics homework at the time, the spelling of "cynical" escaped me at that moment.
I have to agree with (1), but (2) is a bit more iffy -- you need to look at the architecture and the platform in use. In 1994, I was using a Pentium 90 with 16MB RAM, and Windows 3.1 was screamingly fast. I now have three machines ranging from PII350/64MB/Win98 to Athlon 500/192MB/Linux and none of them are anywhere near as fast. There are tons of other variables, too -- how well does Processor 1 vs. Processor 2 scale in an N-way configuration? How much memory bandwidth is available? How well can the underlying OS make those resources available?
Of course, I'm comparing apples and oranges. Regardless of the stats you use for comparison, it's all benchmarketing.
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fat lenny's gonna lick your brain today.
The French, eating Mac'n Cheese? Hell no, I think asparagus tips and snails are what they have in mind.
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
It's been a few years since my high school Spanish class, but doesn't 'no leche' mean 'he isn't licking?' Assuming I'm correct, 'no lecho' would be 'I'm not licking'.
It seems that you believe everything in the Bible.
Sorry, but I'm afraid I created that, you, and all your memories yesterday. Sorry for the confusion.
WHAT? You mean a 286 with 2meg RAM running Windows 3.0 on a 10meg hard drive can't do this anymore???
No, it's the French, their testing grounds were in the Polynesian islands. All the crap from their nuclear testing is now spread pretty evenly around the southern Pacific Ocean. I certainly wouldn't want them to start up real testing again, let them have their computer :-)
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Open mind, insert foot.
it kinda reminds me of an old Star Trek (1st gen) episode where some planet was in the midst of a war, but it was all computer simulated, and whoever lost a virtual 'battle' had to send a bunch of people to a death chamber.
So if China ran a simulation of an ICBM launched at LA, pitted against a US simulation of a 'star wars' ABM missile trying to knock it out of the sky, and the US missed, we'd have to bump off a bunch of LA residents, all with no messy radiation or destruction of property!
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
***
The Spanish intercepted these French intercepts and are still pondering a suspicious code phrase: "noleche"
***
Luckily the Spanish found their Franglish translator which revealed the secret message: I'm not licking.
(from lécher, to lick)
I was thinking noleche was a secret French message instead of a secret Spanish message. Don't speak Spanish so I defer to you on the he's not licking theorem
=)
Alternatively, is it a "real" supercomputer, with a scalable high bandwidth low latency interconnect?
If so, it makes me wonder why they just don't buy a Cray...
Chris
Don't you mean SPECfp? That's where alphas have the most advantage. At similar clock speeds, the SPECints aren't that far off for a P3 and Alpha (IIRC)...
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
Something that breezes through nuclear calculation could probably brute-force crack most encryption methods in an afternoon...
That would be very bad crypto, in that case. The keyspace enumerable (ie, assume a key checked per cycle -- obviously a best case scenario) for a 1 TeraOPs machine is just shy of 40 bits per second. So in two seconds it does 41, in 4 seconds it does 42... in 24 hours, just over 51 bits. Since you on average only need to search the half the keyspace, the best this machine could hope to crack using brute force is a 52 bit key per day.
But they were talking about eventually scaling up to 100 odd TOPs. 128 == 2^7, which brings it up our searchable space to just under 60 bits.
At that rate, You'll need to search for 2^68 days to break a 128 bit key. That's a pretty long time. Go calculate it for yourself. Oh, I'll do it, it's 10^20 odd days.
Johan
Well, the first few millionths of a second. In a multi-stage device you may have 3+ seperate fission and fusion reactions triggering each other at exponentially greater yields.
Simple devices use primary with plutonium core compression fisson device with tritium core. X-rays escaping the primary tamper are focused via beryllium into plastic/foam/explosive waveguides to generate enough energy in second detonation to heat lithium-6 deuteride or other fussion fuel sufficiently, and outer bomb casing is often made of fissile material for free extra bang (and higher burn efficiency of lithium). An extremely complex system. I always thought it was cool how in "dial-a-yield" by simply varying the tritium in the primary core "pit", you can change the final yield by a good order of magnitude or two - for tactical situations vs. simple inventory.
Handling propogation of energy between stages introduces signifigant aspects of materials sciences, and is one of the more interesting problems with maintaining a stockpile - how things change after sitting and bombarding itself with low level radiaition for years on end. Lots of trace isotopes appearing, opacity to x-rays changing [the internal power exchange medium - "high temperature photon gas"), _very_ neat stuff.
As an aside, the utilities to work through these exchanges are what Dr. Lee is accused of losing his backup tapes of. Rather important stuff, as higher efficiency means more yield per launch platform.
I'll do it for cheesy poofs.
You do this so you don't have to actually set off a nuclear device to predict how it will perform. You must do a number of real nuclear tests to get baseline information. After that, you can do computer simulations of similar explosions. These simulations are VERY processor-intensive (like weather prediction) and require these large parallel systems to compute.
The U.S. does the same thing with massively parallel systems at Sandia National Labs and Lawrence Livermore National Lab. Check out the list of the top 500 supercomuter sites in the world -- http://www.top500.org/ -- to see who's doing this kind of thing.
Even if this is a powerful machine, I'm afraid it will need a VERY long time to boot...
Especially on NT : Windows has detected a new CPU.. please insert Windows NT CD-ROM... Windows has detected a new CPU....
Fetchez la vache !
The machine will be built out of 4-CPU nodes based on the ES40. The OS will be a customized version of Tru64 5.0, which has VMS-style clustering. This will make the entire cluster appear as 1 machine, i.e. the OS only has to be installed one time. The CPUs will be the new 21364, aka EV7.
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http://gammatron.weblogger.com
I would rather have them simulate it than to start nuking the Nevada and New Mexico plains again.
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
Well, when I think about it it is amusing that I've been duped. Before amusement becomes irritation. Not with the origional Troll, but with oneself. I couldn't believe I could be so stupid as to respond to it.
I don't think that Trolls should be ignored. If there is a good Troll, I like to respond in a humourous way. This time I failed.
I know what you mean about the moderators not understanding insightful. I've posted about one insightful comment, and had dozens moderated up as insightful. What I don't quite follow is why you're so angry about it. Ordinary people get to moderate. People are fallable. Not everyone does know what insightful means. Hell, most people even get the meaning of the word "instantaneously" (to choose a random example) wrong too. This is because nobody knows everything. This does not give you just cause to correct minor errors with pedantry. It is no reason for swearing. And if you think good trolls shuld be encouraged, then GREAT! respond to them with anger. That's what they're there for.
And as you can see, I (Neil Sluman) have responded with my name. Happy now?
Once again, the difference between architectures and software slips through the grasp of the media...
Also, I could have sworn that there were restrictions on the computational power that we could export from the U.S. Something that breezes through nuclear calculation could probably brute-force crack most encryption methods in an afternoon...
It's not for analyzing, it's for simulation and emulation to verify designs without physical testing. The simultanious equations to do these things are pretty extensive and a hugely parallel processor is very useful. Remember, all the interesting things happen in the first millionth of a second, beyond that it's an expansion/compression issue of the blast propogation.
Where would this be placed in the current supercomputer ranking?
My question is:
Why would you want to put so much into analyzing nuclear explosions?
I can see for weapons testing and maybe just out of scientific curiosity. Are there any other reasons anyone can think of?
Quick translation:
..... The power of 5 teraflops is obtained by the use of the Compaq Alphaserver SC series of supercomputers..... ..... is the first of three steps in the realisation of the nuclear weapon simulation centre. The second step, towards the year 2005, will see an increase to a power of between 30 and 50 teraflops and the last step, 2009, to a machine of about a 100 teraflops.
.....
The installation of this supercomputer
I'll do it for cheesy poofs.
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2B1ASK1
Mhz only has any validity as a benchmark within an architecture. To compare across architectures, you must use bogomips!
Repeat after me: Mhz only has any validity as a benchmark within an architecture. And even that validity is limited. A 400Mhz PII is NOT 33% faster than a 300Mhz PII. It's maybe 10%. To talk about Ghz Alphas as though they are at all similar to Ghz Intels is crazy.
You want to share CPU benchmarks on something like this, talk about SPECint and SPECfp. Not Mhz.
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-- Slashdot sucks.